On the morning of Christmas Day 1989, a few years before the internet existed, my family learned, before sitting down for our Christmas dinner, that the previous day the Romanians had stormed the palace of their dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena. And, in the words of my Romanian plumber 21 years later, finishing my sentence for me, "we killed them".

The demands of Romanian dissidents were extremely basic: "We ask for human rights. We ask for freedom of opinion. We ask for hot water and electricity. We ask for freedom to assemble." These words, written by her father, were discovered by Carmen Bugan in the garage, hidden between an old fridge and the family bicycles, and gave an explanation for the mysterious events that were taking place in the family in the early 1980s – why the glass in the doors was covered in towels, the windows facing the street shrouded in a yellow blanket and the living room off limits. Bugan's father, a minor political dissident living in a village, had been opposing the regime since the early 1960s, typing manifestos on a typewriter buried each night in the garden.

His daughter's memoir of those years is that of an idyllic, Cider with Rosie childhood gradually giving way to a sense of menace, followed by house arrest after her father's imprisonment. Bugan is a poet, and this is not a political history of the events leading up to the Romanian revolution, one of the decisive events in the fall of communism. It is a child's perspective on a society, a political system she barely understands, and the sense of heavy fear and terror that saturated her young life.

In the town, she sees dignified men and women walking with pleasant open smiles she is taught by her mother to imitate because it is civilised; a couple of hours later, the same people are fighting over a loaf of bread. She escapes into literature where characters are concerned with love affairs, a jump from one life to another; the stories and poems she is force-fed at school are paeans of praise to the communist system and the Ceaucescus.

When the typewriter arrives, she explains the system for registering it with the police, how it is "fingerprinted" and how they must provide an explanation for why they need it. An instrument can be used to type about personal feelings (forbidden) or write anti-government pamphlets (forbidden). The ordinariness of everyday life, conveyed in her descriptions of cooking and agriculture and family rows, are a kind of thick veneer to cover silences, like the knowledge of her father's previous arrests. One in three of their neighbours is an informer for the Securitate (secret police) because everything happens through bribing the Securitate.

When her father is arrested, her mother takes her younger brother away for hospital treatment and 13-year-old Carmen and her younger sister are left alone to fend for themselves. The gaps between Ceausescu's speeches about agricultural and technological progress and the actual reality grow more and more absurd: "The shops are absolutely empty and dark; the crops, if they don't fail, go straight to Russia on big freight trains and our electricity goes there for free. A cold war is raging and we are feeding the Russians."

Carmen's father has come to the attention of Amnesty International and in a state amnesty for political prisoners, he is released, but returns home a changed and partly broken man, asking permission to eat or use the bathroom. He is not free, the house is just an extension of the Securitate. They receive word that he will have permission to emigrate to the US and the teenage Carmen makes the dangerous journey to the US embassy to get the relevant papers. Once they are safe in Michigan and are in the process of becoming Americans, she is able to reflect on how the state has managed to eat away at not only rights, but a whole identity. In one of the most telling insights I've read about life under communism, she recalls how the family could no longer recognise the difference between spontaneous feelings and the ones created for their own protection.

Burying the Typewriter is a warm and humane work, though its child's perspective remains muffled from the greater horrors of the regime. When she returns to Romania 25 years later, to look for her father's files, she finds a dirty and desolate capital, lost lives, and those whom she thought of as friends apologising for their betrayals. She forgives. What else can she do? She understands now that everyone was frightened and her father's ordeal one that few have the courage to replicate. On a vastly smaller scale than Vasily Grossman's epic Life and Fate, Bugan nonetheless makes the same great point: that the right to be an individual is not the right to greed and selfishness, but the authenticity of the self and one's own modest idiosyncrasies, which communism was never able to deliver.